The Great Geek Manual

• About.com has posted a link of the Top PC Pranks for April Fool’s Day, which includes a number of irritating little programs you can covertly install on a computer.
• April Fools’ Day On The Web is a comprehensive archive of links to major mainstream websites to that have pulled pranks on April Fool’s Day.
• Each year, BMW runs fake advertisements in magazines and newspapers announcing some fantastic new technical advance, such as instant messaging.
• The Museum of Hoaxes has an amazing list of The Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time.
• PC World has posted a list of the Top 10 April Fools’ Day Joke Web Sites.
• Read more than you ever wanted to know about April Fool’s Day at Wikipedia.
• Snopes has conjecture as to the Origin of April Fool’s Day.
• Wikipedia has a very thorough article on Google’s April Fool’s Day Hoaxes perpetrated over the years.

It’s that time of year again – April Fool’s Day! And the internet loves April Fool’s Day like kids love Halloween. It’s a great day to randomly surf your favorite websites, and I’ve decided to post the best of the pranks being played around the net here for those of you who have better things to do than to veg out in front of a computer all day.

CNET
“Edit wars come to spy agencies’ Intellipedia” is listed among today’s headlines. In the article by Declan McCullagh, CNet reports that, “It turns out that the federal government’s Intellipedia, a classified Wikipedia just for spies and spooks, is as prone to altercations as is its public counterpart.

Then, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Vice President Dick Cheney reverted the classified Intellipedia entry to the earlier version that listed the Buffy musical “Once More, With Feeling” as the top choice. “The juxtaposition of Buffy’s emotional dependence on her mentor and the interpretive dance number was deeply moving,” Cheney said. “Plus there was some serious blood and gore toward the end.”
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1826
Samuel Morey patents the internal combustion engine.

1948
Alpher, Bethe and Gamow’s famous letter to Physical Review is published. The “Big Bang” theory had previously been around as a competing theory with “Steady State.” Their paper gave a “hot Big Bang” mathematical analysis of atomic events during the creation of the universe, and explains the relative abundance of the light elements (particularly helium) in the universe. The paper is written by Ralph Alpher and George Gamow. The esteemed Hans Bethe was persuaded to lend his name as a co-author for the amusing similarity to “alpha, beta, gamma,” the first letters of the Greek alphabet, but Bethe will actually make later contributions to discussions of the theory.

1960
The first weather observation satellite, Tiros I, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the United States in order to test experimental techniques for taking television footage of weather patterns from orbit. It is the first of several launched in the TIROS program, named for their function: Television Infrared Observation Satellite. The launch is NASA’s first step in determining whether satellites can be useful in the study of the Earth. At that time, the effectiveness of satellite observations was still unproven. TIROS will prove extremely successful in weather forecasting.
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1903
Richard Pearse of New Zealand reputedly flies a powered, heavier-than-air machine, nine months before the Wright Brothers make their famous and well-documented flight at Kitty Hawk. Accounts vary, but his flight may have traveled as far as 350 yards through the air before striking a large hedge. If true, the aircraft is the first to use modern ailerons, rather than inferior wing warping system that the Wrights’ early designs will use. Pearse’s machine also has a modern tricycle undercarriage permitting it to takeoff without ramps. Some sources will mark this as the anniversary of his flight, others will claim the event occurred some months later.

1930
The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) institutes the Motion Pictures Production Code. Also known as the Hays Code or simply the Production Code, the code a set of censorship guidelines concerning crime, religion, sex, and violence in films.

John Logie Baird achieves the synchronization of sound with television pictures.

1939
Harvard and International Business Machines (IBM) sign an agreement for the construction of the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). The computer will weigh nearly five tons and contain more than 750,000 separate components. It will read instructions from paper tape and data from punch cards.
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240 BC
Chinese Astronomers record the first confirmed perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet. The account is confirmed by Babylonian, Chinese, Japanese, and Mesopotamian astronomers.

1791
After a proposal in the journal Académie des sciences by Borda, Condorcet, Lagrange, Laplace, and Monge, the French National Assembly finally decides that a metre will be defined as ten millionth of the distance between the north pole and the equator.

1842
Physician Dr. Crawford W. Long of Jefferson, Georgia first uses ether as an anesthetic in surgery. The patient is James Venable, and the surgery is to remove a tumor from the man’s neck.

1858
Hyman L. Lipman of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is granted the first US patent for a lead pencil with an eraser. (US No. 19,783) One-fourth of the length of the pencil contains a piece of india-rubber, so that cutting one end prepares the pencil for writing and cutting the other end prepares it for erasing.
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1807
Vesta 4, the only asteroid visible to the naked eye, thus the brightest on record, is first discovered by the amateur astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers from Bremen. Vesta is a main belt asteroid with a diameter of 525km and a rotation period of 5.34 hours. Pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 show Vesta’s complex surface, with a surprisingly diverse geology similar to that of terrestrial worlds, an exposed mantle, ancient lava flows, and impact basins. Though no bigger than the state of Arizona, it had once been a molten interior. This contradicts conventional ideas that asteroids are essentially cold, rocky fragments left behind from the early days of planetary formation.

1886
The first batch of Coca Cola is brewed over a fire in a backyard in Atlanta, Georgia by Dr. John Pemberton as a cure for hangovers, stomach aches, and headaches. He markets the drink as a “brain tonic and intellectual beverage,” and first sells it to the public a few weeks later on May 8. Coke contains cocaine as an ingredient until 1904, when the drug will be banned by Congress.

1903
The first transatlantic news service begins between New York and London over Marconi’s wireless. On March 30 1903, The Times in London becames the first newspaper to establish an ongoing arrangement with the Marconi Telegraph Company for the regular transmission of news between the United States and the UK. Shortly thereafter, the New York Times requests that it be part of the arrangement. Despite extensive teething problems, the importance of wireless as a cheap form of communication will quickly become obvious

1910
In Monaco, the world’s largest oceanographic museum is opened part of the Oceanographic Institute, which was founded in 1906. The grandiose facade of the museum overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. It is established by donations from Prince Albert I of Monaco.
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Comics

• If you haven’t heard, the complete Elfquest series is being posted online. Elfquest is one of the first and most successful independent comics in history.
• As is you needed them, Ectoplasmosis has posted 10 Reasons Why Elfquest Rules, just to make sure you know why you should be excited.

Film

• Popular Mechanics has posted a list of The 10 Most Prophetic Sci-Fi Movies Ever in honor of Arthur C. Clarke. I think it looses plausability right around “Short Circuit,” but it’s still a good read.

Internet

• Modern Mechanix takes a look at What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008, looking forward from 1968. Next up, I demand that my Congressional representative explain why the hell I’m not living in a bubble city.
• The Sci-Fi Dominion is the newest social network on the internet, and it caters exclusively to science fiction fans.

Literature

• Free Fiction: The Green Man Review has posted an audio version of the short story “The Stickball Witch” by Peter S. Beagle as read by the author.
• The List Universe has posted an excellent list of the Top 15 Science Fiction Book Series ever. I was surprised to find that I had never even heard of some them, but I’ll definitely be picking some of these up.

Television

• I don’t usually watch A&E, but it looks to me as if they’re about to hit one out of the park. They have posted a trailer for The Andromeda Strain, a remake from Ridley Scott, the director of Alien, Blade Runner.
• OnlineTVEasy now allows your to watch almost any episode of The Simpsons online. Legal? No. Awesome? Hells yeah.

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• Because You Value Your Soul has posted a list of 59 Of The Coolest Toilet Signs Around The World
• Ex Astris Scientia has an awesome array of Star Trek technical illustrations, including a Comparison chart of Starfleet Bridge Illustrations.
• The Guardian has posted an list of The World’s 50 Most Powerful Blogs. Surprisingly, The Huffington Post beats out Boing Boing for the number one slot.
• HackCollege is a life hacking website for college students that is all about doing more with less.
• Make your own oragami ceiling cat with this simple, downloadable sheet.
• PopGive has posted a gallery of photos from Inside Google’s Office in Zurich.